Preparing the ground

Arizona Lunatic Paul Gosar did what?

He tweeted a doctored anime video that shows him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, haw haw, very normal healthy sensible behavior.

Martin Pengelly reports:

Twitter attached a hateful conduct warning to Gosar’s tweet, which also showed the sword-wielding congressman appearing to threaten Joe Biden and was also posted to Instagram.

It’s not just “hateful” conduct though. That would be less alarming. It’s “get people killed” conduct. It’s incitement conduct.

The roughly 90-second video is an altered version of a Japanese anime series, interspersed with shots of border patrol officers and migrants at the US border with Mexico.

Because migrants at the southern border are a reason to get very very racist.

In one section, characters whose faces are replaced with those of Gosar and fellow extremist Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are seen fighting other characters.

Again with the palliative language. “Extremist” is soothing; what they are is violent. This isn’t the stupid kind of “violent” like saying feminists are “violent” because they don’t think men can be women, this is the genuine kind of violent that incites people to perform actual literal physical lethal violence. This isn’t a game. January 6 was no game.

The Yale historian Joanne Freeman, author of The Field of Blood, a well-regarded history of violence in Congress before the civil war, wrote: “Threats of violence lead to actual violence. They clear the ground. They cow opposition. They plant the idea. They normalize it. They encourage it. They maim democracy. And run the risk of killing it.”

The US is in very deep trouble.

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